Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become

By: Michael Schrage

Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt

Who do you want your customers to become? According to MIT innovation expert and thought leader Michael Schrage, if you aren’t asking this question, your strategic marketing and innovation efforts will fail.

In this latest HBR Single, Schrage provides a powerful new lens for getting more value out of innovation investment. He argues that asking customers to do something different doesn’t go far enough - serious marketers and innovators must ask them to become something different instead. Even more, you must invest in their capabilities and competencies to help them become better customers. Schrage’s primary insight is that innovation is an investment in your client, not just a transaction with them. To truly innovate today, designing new products or features or services won’t get you there. Only by designing new customers - thinking of their future state, being the conduit to their evolution - will you transform your business.

Marketing executives, brand managers, strategic innovators, and entrepreneurs alike should understand how successful innovation rebrands the client and not the product. A requisite question for its time, Who Do You Want Your Customers To Become will liberate you and your team from ‘innovation myopia’ - and turn your innovation efforts on their head.

©2012 Michael Schrage (P)2012 Gildan Media LLC

Critic reviews

"An astonishing insight, one that will last" (Seth Godin)

a quantum level game changer

This instituted a paradigm shift for how I perceive and implement innovation. my human services organization is now fully participant-orientated and provider efficient.

Insightful and concise

I read a lot of business books, but none of them resonate with me more than this one, published in 2012. I read it quickly, but I'm going to have to read it again to answer each of the questions in the book.

A Little Diamond

Great stories and insights. Get this book if you want to start thinking differently about your business.

Too simple. Not practical

gives you a question without any real practical framework on how to get their or how to derive to the "right" answer. just because you want your customers to become something (i.e. a statistics master) doesn't mean the customer wants to. the question "what do I want my customer to become" is not customer centric and is not designed to serve the customer.